megaweapon's sister

as of late, most of my blogs have been very negative. i've been going through a hard time and its fairly easy to let bad circumstances get you down. so, i've decided to dedicate this blog to things i like. kind of like that song in that movie with all the kids... "i simply remember my favorite things, and then i don't feel so bad". here we go boosting the morale:

1. Zombies: i love zombie movies and zombies on TV and zombies in my dreams. i have some of the most awesome zombie hunter dreams and i always wake up feeling so empowered and energized. the best zombie movies are Cemetery Man, Shaun of the Dead, and Resident Evil (the first one).

2. Roller Coasters and other carnie rides: maybe its the adrenaline rush, maybe its the joy of laughing at all the people that get scared or puke, or maybe i just like 'em cause they give me orgasms. that could be it.  six flags is great, but even the little traveling carnivals make me soooo happy.

3. SWAT teams: ogodilovepockets!!!!! pockets!! little black pockets everywhere! and firepower. mmmmmm... firepower. i'm always really impressed that they can remember what is kept in which pocket. they must have about a zillion of them. and they always look so serious- the SWAT people, not the pockets.

4. Miniatures: something about tiny things- tiny people, scale objects, little houses, etc..- gives me a pleasant tummy tingling. i bought a great big huge dollhouse once but i haven't had the time or money to fix it up nice and decorate it- even if there was a decent local miniature shop. oh well, the sims make a great substitute. they give me my mini-kicks and fit conveniently in my harddrive.

5. Aminals: of course, the list wouldn't be complete without aminals. i haven't yet found a type of animal that i don't like. yes, that includes insects and bats and snakes and ugly, slimy beasties. like i always say, "nothing better than a face full of baby rats".

There are other things i like, too, but those are my constants- things i can count on to always lift the gloom even if only for a short time.

shasta nosebleed

i'm tired of the things around me dying. Death's been close several times over the past few months. i've felt him, i've seen him. and i've watched him take from those around me. each time it feels as if he's giving me a whispery kiss that means "don't be confused, someday soon i'll be coming for you". its about the bunny, and its not about the bunny. the bunny is a feeder rabbit for my roommate's 9ormore ft. long boa. she's been eating rats her whole life and didn't know what to do with the bunny, so she injured him, but didn't feed. little animals keep being brought into my house to die and it leaves a stain on the place, like bad karma... or bad coffee. i just keep thinking about the bunny in there (in the bathtub with the snake right now) and how frightened and alone it is. and how it must be in pain. and i know there's absolutely nothing i can do but wait and see if the snake changes her mind or if i have to try to put the bunny back together.

its not all about the bunny... its about life. my life and how worthless it all is. i can't look back to my past because all i see there is waste and disappointment and the repeated betrayal of everyone i've ever come in contact with. the happiest day of my life wasn't my wedding day, or the day my daughter was born, it was the day i asked a drug dealer (brother of a friend) for tylenol and received opiates instead. those were the most blissful hours of my existence and they were spent with a plastic rhinocerous who i felt great affection for. the bunny makes me feel helpless, forces me to face what a waste i am. the bunny makes me small.

gimme back my rhinocerous

as some of you may remember, one of my lovely lovely symptoms to my beautiful, fun mystery illness is that i lose my hair. its gotten a lot worse lately. my floors are covered with a fine carpet of hair.

i was about to just give up and shave it all off, but i decided to get it cut first and see how that works. i figured if i didn't like the way it looked after that then i could shave it off. so here's what my hair looked like before i was sick:
 

 and this is what it looks like after i got it cut (today):

 i still look kind of bald, but not quite as bald and the lady who did it said that if i decided i wanted to go even shorter then i should come back. she just didn't want me to go from having veryvery long hair to having veryvery short hair too fast. maybe it gives one motion sickness? *shrug* my logic in wanting to go very short was that then it wouldn't tangle on my hand quite so much when i wash it. the haircut lady also told me about this haircare stuff they sell in the mall that's guaranteed to stop what hair you have left from falling out and sometimes promotes new hair growth. i think i'll give it a shot, its made by paul mitchell, not some fly-by-night, generic, crazy-name brand like hair gro ultramax! in the meantime i'm looking into getting a wig. i think i'll start with this one:

 

i can order it off the internets and then wear it when i go to shop for real wigs. i just don't like the idea of walking into a wig store bald. its like walking into a clothing store naked... except they probably don't arrest you. i would actually get several wigs off the interbutts, but i want to make sure i get a color i like and trying them on is half the fun!! i mean, if i have to go bald, i might as well get some enjoyment out of it.

oh, and here's a pic of a cat in a box, just for the hell of it:

ladybugs don't wear neckties

here's my attempt at writing something happy:

i went to austin for sushi with ryan today. i promised him i'd go with him one more time before he has to move no matter how sick i was, so even though i strained or tore an abdominal muscle (hurts real fucking bad) last night, i went with him anyway. we spent about 2 hours and $126 at the sushi bar and got enough sushi for 4 people plus sake and miso soup and squid salad and they gave us some of those japanese ice cream balls, too. i love that place. its the best sushi i've ever had. and i took vicodin with my sake so it was an extra special occaision! the place is called the Korea Garden and its at 6519 N. Lamar, phone number (512) 302-3149 in case you want to know what real sushi tastes like. its just a little place but its the BEST SUSHI EVAR!! srsly.

and here are some pics of baby rats. i've finally started naming them and i think i'm going to try and get their cages in here so i can take some better photos. looking at the same terrified-rat-in-hand pose gets old after a while. plus i wanna show off my super xbox hueg, crazy expensive cages i got.
 

this one is Nadine

and this is Atlas

mist of plastic

When I was last in school, I was given the assignment to write a 2-3 page paper on Buddhism for extra credit. For some obscure reason, I have decided to go ahead and write this paper even though no one knows when (if ever) I will be able to re-enroll. The research was a little disorienting as I have never been exposed to any but the most mainstream Buddhist concepts. Then I started reading about the four noble truths.

As I understand them, the four noble truths are the original Buddha's convictions about life that one must understand and accept before traveling on the path to nirvana. I was pleasantly surprised and amused to recognize a familiar concept in the first noble truth: "life is dukkah". If you say this aloud, it kind of sounds like "life is dookie" as in poo or shit. and, indeed, dukkah is roughly translated as "suffering" which can be one of the connotations  of "shit". So, in order to find the secret to happiness, one must first realize that life is shit.

This is the same message voiced by the dead milkmen in their song Life is Shit. Perhaps the teachings of Buddha aren't so foreign after all. Or maybe I'm just trying to compress an ancient religious truth into a catchy pop phrase so I can better relate to it.

Life is Shit

I ran into a friend of mine
Said he was gonna take some words and make them rhyme
I said "You can fool some of them some of the time,
But you can only fool half them all of the time"
He said "Yes I do believe this is true,
Would you like to come and sniff some glue?
And we'll fly to where the skies are blue
And look for things both bright and new"

And on a pretty Sunday morning
A bunch of pretty Baptist girls
Linked their pretty hands and they sang
Life is shit, life is shit
The world is shit, the world is shit
This is life as I know it
This is life as I know it

And in the sky I saw Richard Nixon
Smoking a lacey with Mr. Dickson
He said "Son there's something I must say,
I do believe I've found a better way"
And a vision came
And I new it was Bob Crane
And Bob sang:

Life is shit, life is shit
The world is shit, the world is shit
This is life as I know it
This is life as I know it

And when my friend and I were done
We went to rest upon the sun
Cause life takes from us the things we love
And it robs us of the special ones
And it puts them high where we can't climb
And we only miss them all the time

And we sing:
Life is shit, life is shit
The world is shit, the world is shit
This is life as I know it
This is life as I know it…

filarial soup

what is this obsession with "real"?

i think we've all seen those bulletins bemoaning the "fakeness" of people on myspace and threatening to delete people from a friend's list unless they repost. i've had a few people try to entice me into being friends with them by writing me an e-mail stating that they are "real". not that they're good or true or funny or smart or nice to talk to, just "real", like its the only thing that truly matters.

i think when people use the word "real" on the internet, they intend to reflect that they present themselves in virtual reality just as they are in physical reality. i don't put a lot of stock in real. i think people who are "real" in this sense are boring, without imagination, and too easily manipulated by society. these people take great care in representing their physical selves in cyberspace as precisely, accurately, and anally as possible. they don't do this tedious chore for their own sake but, by their own admission, so they won't offend anyone else.
don't get me wrong, i don't believe its right for a person to misrepresent themselves to the detriment of others, like a pedophile who claims he's a 15 year old girl, but i do think that the internet should be a place where people aren't inhibited by their physical lives. this is a place where great experimentation is possible and adhering so closely to the rule of real shuts out vast opportunities for the unreal.

i love the internet because i can say just about anything i want without reprecussions. i can be anyone, i can meet anyone, i can engage anyone in conversation on any level as long as they are willing to meet me in my imaginary plane. if they insist on staying "real" then i doubt we'll ever get any farther than hello, what's your name, and how is the weather?

for the record, my representation of myself on the internet isn't entirely "real". yes, my name is brak, i'm a girl, those pictures are of me, and everything i write here comes from the heart, but i have many different hearts, different personas, and they aren't all given the opportunity of expression in everyday life- mostly due to societal restraints. if i only let my everyday, all-pupose Brak-persona out on the internet i'd be just as boring as i am in real life and how sad that would be. i have a whole villiage's worth of ideas and perspectives inside me and how pathetic and wasteful it would be to block out all but those that most accurately reflect the ideas that i have on a day-to-day basis; my "real" thoughts.

so next time someone claims that they are "real" you can count them as either a coward because they are too afraid to explore their own alternate dimensions, or a simpleton because they have no alternate dimensions. why did we create the social internet (as opposed to the business or information internet) if we were going to restrict it's population to everyday, real-life cowards and simpletons? in other words, people who have no soul, no originality, no vitality. and what good are these people to me? just a waste of virtual space.

superpower hummus

i slept most of this weekend and it made me sad. i was supposed to go to the home depot to get supplies to finish my rat cages up- you know, make them all homey- but i couldn't get up the energy to wheel myself in mah wheely-chair. i usually have ryan wheel me, but since we were planning on getting a large trash can as well, he would've been pushing a shopping cart. (oh... i rented a wheely chair just for the month until the weird pains and fatigues and dizzyness, etc. go away. its not for keeps.) yes, things are getting desperate when the boys can't be men and also when boozehounds like myself can't even get up the energy to make a weekend trip to the home depot, much less down a bottle of tequila. *sigh* oh well, i've been uncool most of my life, i can certainly handle doing it again.

rat update: rei has 5 girls and 5 boys. i'll be putting up pics and naming them in the weeks to come. also, lucy's pneumonia is improving, but penny has a little hernia. nothing can really be done about a small rat hernia except see if it gets better by itself. it doesn't seem to be causing her any trouble so far, but if it gets bad the only option is youth in asia to avoid a horrible, painful death by bowel-twisting.

ok, i saw that movie, 28 weeks later and i just wanted to say wtf?! what kind of zombie has an eye-fetish and knows how to use a key-card?! and he was pretty much the *only* zombie in the whole film. the rest of the "zombies" were just running shadows. its only fun if you can see them rot. i also think there was too much focus on the living in this film. i saw way more scenes of  naive, but pulse-bearing children than the decomposing, flesh-hungry children i was expecting. and there were a lot of tiny plot holes that betrayed the writers' apathy for making a coherent film. actually, it seems to be accepted that horror movies in general are more about the shock value than whether or not the story makes sense. personally, i find this attitude disappointing. a lot of these movies start with an intriguing premise and then instead of building it into a working plot, they just leave the story hanging and fill the space with confusing, jumbled shots that may have been zombies (or the blair witch) or may have just been the camera dude falling over. can't we have a solid, well-planned story and a horde of insatiable undead? overall, i'd say 28 weeks later is good for a one-time viewing in the theater, especially if you have a vivid imagination, but i wouldn't buy it or even illegally download it. it just isn't worth a second look in my opinion.

ryan finally started cleaning up the house yesterday. he made the bedroom clean and got all the laundry off the bed... and when i went over to feed the rats this morning, there's *more laundry on the bed*. LAUNDRY DOES NOT GO ON THE BED!!!!! under any circumstances. unless you are using the bed to fold it, and then it must be quickly relocated before the bed becomes its permamnent resting-place. then you'll be sleeping in your tangled up garments and have to wear sheets like togas because you can't find your clean clothes. and socks get under the mattress and in your ears and its just a tragedy.